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Viewing Files on the Web Considered Possession?
Packet Pusher writes "A Georgia lawyer is taking a case to appeals court to prove that the mere act of viewing a website does not constitute possession of the materials that were automatically cached on your hard drive." While the case in question involves pornographic photos, the implications of such a declaration could reach far further.
Apparently, you need to learn a bit about HTML. You could have a 1,600 x 1,200 image of some pervert doing a kid. If the image source reference in HTML explicitly stated "height=1 width=1" the image would be a single blip on the browser screen but the full image would still have been downloaded. And in the world of broadband, that image could have taken 1/2 second to download or less, meaning that the viewer would probably not have noticed.
/. by those incompetent jackasses who like to link supposedly valid pictures that end up being tubgirl or lemon party. Well, guess what's then in our cache even though we probably don't want it there.
Anyone who wants to be a real jerk could easily hide hi-res porn images on a site this way. And if the person was duped to visiting a web site that appears to be legitimate, he might never know what kind if images just ended up on his system. We often see this same type of thing on
And the vast majority of people don't even know what a cache is, let alone how to clean it out regularly, so the argument about "They should know to clean it out regularly" doesn't work.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
This all begs the question of why viewing anything should ever be illegal.
No, it raises the question. Begging the question is another thing entirely.
Theoretically it is still possible to recover the undelying data that was over-written. In practice it is very expensive and not 100% guaranteed.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I think we are going to disagree on this issue. I'm more interested in the principle than the individual in this case.
The principle is that Walker County can charge you with possession even if you have never requested the images or viewed them. The images could be preloads, popups, or even downloaded via mal-ware. They don't care. They will charge you with a count for every image that your computer viewed--and pop-ups or mal-ware could download images for four hours.
Given that the Bush Administration believes that even pr0n that features consenting adults is illegal, this prosecution should be seen as extremely dangerous to your civil rights. It won't take vile child porn to get you thrown in jail--just anything the Administration doesn't approve of. It is guilt by association. Guilt for seeing. Guilty knowledge. And we are talking big time jail.
You are very impressed that he viewed the images for four hours. If that is what impresses you so, then the law should just state that viewing the images is illegal rather than possession. But laws don't do that because we know that we shouldn't throw people in jail for having seen something--hence the reason we require possession. If he had seen the images on TV we wouldn't be talking right now, but web browsers keep a temporary cache that is meant to be *temporary* and should not be considered possession anymore than the fact you could type in a URL and get the images should be considered possession.
Mind you, child molesters need to go to jail, but thought crimes and laws that presume guilt are a danger to us all.
PS, Orwellian *is* capitalized since it is based on Orwell's name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwellian
I'm not a lawyer either but in the US, entrapment is something only policemen can be guilty of.
Please, for the love of God, no more car analogies.
I know that was a joke, but destructive actions should never be the result of a GET request anyway - for exactly that sort of reason.
GET should just get a page, and should be (relatively) repeatable. Modification should only happen on a POST.
Advanced users are users too!
It also sounds like Superior Court Judge Kristina Connelly might not have been in agreement with the not guilty verdict (or for that matter, terribly pleased by it) and handed him a 20-year sentence for possessing child porn by (ab-)using consecutive sentencing - a sort of reverse "jury nullification." Now I don't know for sure that's what happened, and I hate pedophiles as much as the next guy, but every time a judge reshapes a jury verdict to his own liking during sentencing, justice loses. If pedophiles felt at risk of getting 20 years in jail for every 4 hours of binging on kiddie porn, they'd figure they might as well go out and try the real thing.
Possessing something doesn't create demand. Buying or paying money for something does.
Actually, if you tried to do that, you'd probably get the drive to hit at least one sector that wasn't quite right, and it would begin remapping sectors. Once it starts remapping blocks on the drive, you've got no way of knowing that you've overwritten everything, since the naughty bits might end up mapped out of the visible part of the drive by the drive's firmware.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Unfortunately that is true for US and most countries, not just Bali.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
If you want a more secure and efficient method, take a look at Peter Gutmann's work.
_ del.html
Actually, I'll save you a trip to google, just because I'm that nice.
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure
Le français vous intéresse?
You can't shred a file if it's on, say, ReiserFS because the filesystem doesn't overwrite data in place. shred's manpage actually reveals that shredding just plain doesn't work nowadays, as it doesn't work on journalled filesystems. You would have to boot a live CD and run shred on the block device to be sure.
-insert a witty something-
Interestingly, the statute explicitly provides an affirmative defense once the possession becomes knowingly:
The way I read that, if you immediately take "reasonable" (note does not have to be absoultely effective) steps to destroy any images you receive as soon as you become aware of them, this is an affirmative defense. If you let them sit around on your hard drive without even trying to delete them, and you knew about them, then you have a problem.If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Excuse me, but I do not think you have any idea just how much child pornography is out there. I worked with the Red Cross for a short while, tracking these sites down so they could be nullrouted.
A single site can contain more child pornography than a pedophile human could ever hope to wank to without his/her penis/clit falling off.
You don't need to add more content.
Besides, P2P eliminates the need for someone to pay in order to obtain it, so the point isn't entirely valid. I agree that it's a very fine line to walk between just viewing (fine by me; don't see what's worse with this than watching Checznians cutting some poor bastard's throat), and actually contributing to the production (raising demand, causing profit), but the line is still there, IMHO.
If the 1x1 pixels are changed back to dots, and the victim visits the page again, the new version will replace the old version in the cache, but the images stay.
You could even make it so that the 1x1 pixels are only included for the first access from the same IP. Then make the page reload itself.
better yet, use a javascript that silently submits a form in a hidden iframe. The target of that form is a page with the discriminating images. results of POST requests are not cached.
easy :
;)
apt-get install wipe
wipe -f ~/.mozilla/{randomstring}/Cache
it does erase content and rewrite on it. quiet efficient
mount -t tempfs none ~/.mozilla
Put this at the beginning of your Mozilla launch script
mountpoint ~/.mozilla || { echo 'Mozilla profile directory not a tempfs'; exit 1; }
As I'm sure you've been told already, prefetching DOES NOT fetch hrefs, it fetches
tags, when specified. I'd wager that less than 5% of all web designers are actively using these.